Speech recognition and voodoo had much in common during the 1990s. Both were more art than science, both required prayer and a bit of luck, and both failed to work much of the time.

Let's follow the Spirit of Christmas Past into an Iowa living room 10 years ago, a room in which my 80-year-old grandmother pulled the wrapping from a present and held aloft a cardboard box. "Oh," she said in some confusion, "what is this?" One of her children explained that this was a voice recognition program—she could use it to dictate her AOL e-mails without having to hunt and peck her way across the keyboard.

It was a thoughtful gift. My grandmother, though the best of women in ways too numerous to count, never learned to type during her many years on the farm, and the "delete" key perpetually eluded her. Her e-mails contained sentences that started out well enough before devolving into a mishmash of symbols, numbers, and letters, before wandering back to sense again like a pilgrim returned home after a lengthy journey. Voice recognition seemed just the thing.

Grandma eyed the package. "Oh," she said again, and set the box aside. It was a wise reaction.

This particular package came with a headset microphone and required lengthy training. The next day, I found one of my cousins at the computer, headset on, reading aloud a passage from Mark Twain. When I came back thirty minutes later, he was still at it. "You have to train the program," he told me. "It'll be worth it." After the training was over, though, he put the program through its pace and disappointment set in. The software took dictation from my cousin about as accurately as I might take it from a Slovak. He gave up shortly thereafter. To the best of my knowledge, my grandmother never put on the headset at all.

Ten years later, the voice recognition dream is still being dreamed by engineers at Nuance, makers of the new Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 that was released last month. We've had the software in our lab for a few weeks now, and we're ready to answer the question: how much progress has voice-recognition made in the last decade?